Having spent a large part of my working life traveling across the US and staying at Holiday Inns, I can tell you that about 95% of the pools out there have a floating top layer consisting of oil, sweat, hairspray and piss.

It ain’t exactly Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” but then it’s hard to imagine Churchill staying either (1) in Atlantic City or (2) at a Holiday Inn.

When the World Bridge Federation joined the International Olympic Committee, players had to obey the drug rules, which restricted caffeine. However, the IOC has relented, accepting that caffeine is not a performance-enhancing drug for a bridge player, as it might be for an athlete; it just helps contestants to stay awake.

Actually, if I need the queen of trumps to be on my right for the finesse to work, I’m rather hoping the player holding same dozes off.

Readability focuses the user’s attention on the content, creating an enhanced — and often much more accessible — reading experience. It also subverts the typical web browsing design paradigm, where each website offers a different visual experience. Instead, to the Readability user, all web content looks the same, once she has clicked a button to engage the Readability view.

Web designers are even now falling on their swords. But that’s barely the half of it:

What Readability 2.0 adds to the mix is automatic payment for content creators. How it works is simple: I pay a small fee each month to use Readability. Most of that money gets divided between the creators of the web pages I’ve viewed in Readability.

For “most,” you can read “70 percent.” And there goes another paradigm:

For the first time, content monetization is no longer the problem of content creators. Writers can stop being salespeople, and focus on what they do best: creating compelling content. The better the content, the more people who engage with it via Readability, the more money writers will make — with no bookkeeping, no ad sales, and no hassle.

I have to admit, I am intrigued by the possibilities of this scheme.

The bucks — okay, more likely the cents — aren’t going to roll in unless I include a snippet of Readability code in the template, as Zeldman explains:

[T]he program is opt-in.

If you want to participate, you go to Readability.com and *register* your site with the program, inserting a unique identifier in your template that the site creates for you.

Easy enough, though of course I have about 8000 static pages that would have to be updated.

I remember when CSS first appeared, back in the Jurassic period of Web development, and we were told that it was important to keep content and style wholly separate. Now we know why — maybe.

Those of us who have loved neither too wisely nor too well have perhaps an enhanced sensitivity to the Classic American Crush, the heart demanding an object of fixation to fill an otherwise-empty space, and the eyes alighting on just such an object at exactly the wrong time. Recounting the full list of those who have unwittingly filled this role for me would be painful for me and probably embarrassing for them, so for the moment I’ll confine myself to fictional characters.

When I was eleven, Freddy Cannon put out a bizarre little stomper called “Abigail Beecher,” a name positively redolent of Victorian gentility: you half-expected her to be teaching history in some classroom with dark-paneled walls and a blackboard so old it was actually green. Well, that much she did; but according to Freddy, she drove a Jaguar E-type, was conversant with contemporary teenage dance steps, and occasionally even surfed. Not a Van Halenesque object of lust, exactly, but someone you couldn’t possibly ignore, especially if you were an Impressionable Youth.

For a squirrelly little kid like me who never imagined himself with so much as a temporary girlfriend, a “card-carrying, broom-riding, house-haunting, cauldron-stirring witch” was exactly the ticket to suburban happiness, and that doofus Durwood, or whatever his name was, simply wasn’t worthy of someone like that.

For the moment, I overlooked the likelihood of clashes with the in-laws, but who doesn’t?

Still, both Miss Beecher and Mrs Stephens were older and wiser than I, and eventually my teenage self turned to someone my own age and my own level of bewilderment: Cassandra Mortmain, narrator of Dodie Smith’s novel I Capture the Castle, who explains her situation in the opening pages of the Sixpenny Book:

[U]p to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate attempt to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

Apparently Mr Mortmain had anticipated my own style by several years. And ultimately poor Cassandra is waylaid by a crush of her own, which unwinds in the most torturous of ways — except for the fact that, well, it doesn’t. Of these three women, she’s the one I’ve had the least success getting over.

Diet Pepsi has introduced a new beverage can. Same volume, but taller than the industry average; the rules of geometry being what they are, it’s also narrower than average, and you can predict what happens next:

The National Eating Disorders Association said it takes offense to the can.

If you’re just joining us, this is a weekly routine wherein we acknowledge the fact that rather a lot of traffic comes from inadvertent search hits on the archives, and that some of said searches are downright hilarious, or at least somewhat loopy.

Well, maybe not all that big, but the Warriors put up a lot of shots: tonight in Oakland they put up 99 of them, and David Lee’s dunk with 21 seconds left was the 99th, putting Golden State up by four. Monta Ellis added two more free throws in the waning moments, and that was it: OKC turned the ball over on its next possession, and will be sent home with a 100-94 loss.

The Warriors hit 43 of those 99 shots. Of the ones they didn’t, twenty got turned into offensive rebounds. (The Thunder had only two offensive rebounds all night.) Then again, this is what they do; Oklahoma City didn’t have any effective way to shut them off.

Ellis led all scorers with 33; as is his wont, he played almost the entire game (45:46). Lee recorded 23 points and 19 rebounds; Stephen Curry had 23 points and 13 assists. (The Thunder had only 15 assists all night). There wasn’t much more, but the Warriors didn’t need much more.

OKC put up only 59 shots; they hit 31, for 52.5 percent, but they got creamed on the backboards, and the three top scorers — as usual, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Jeff Green — produced 29, 21 and 12. That last turnover was the Thunder’s 20th, and that number is pretty scary in its own right.

So a split of the California trip, and now back home to await the Kings, followed by the All-Star break. At 34-19, the Thunder is still on pace for 52-53 wins, but the schedule isn’t going to get a whole lot easier.

A Belgian senator and physician wants her fellow legislators to go on a “sex strike” until the country can break the stalemate that has left it without a government for nine months.

Marleen Temmerman’s “legs closed” campaign started as a joke, she told the Star on Wednesday. Now she can only hope it might work where everything else has failed.

“It sounds funny, but the situation is very serious. We have to get a government. There are people crying in the streets for services.”

Belgium is pretty much fragmented for the moment: there are distinct Walloon (Francophone) and Flemish (Dutch-speaking) regions, each with a measure of autonomy and neither with a great deal of fondness for the other. (Brussels, the capital, is officially bilingual.) Temmerman, judging by her Web site, is Flemish; a stance like this would suggest that she’s not among the separatists who would like to see the country split into Whatta Walloonia and Stupid Flanders.

And it’s not like there are no role models:

“We have two cultures, but everywhere in the world people are living with different cultures. Look at Canada. You have a government, why can’t we?”

If you’re in a high-profile public job like, say, Member of Congress, and you use your real name while trolling Craigslist for some extra-marital action, you are dumber than a tub of mushrooms, and I wouldn’t trust you to run my checkbook, much less the affairs of the nation.

Extra credit for guessing which phrase can be left out entirely without changing the truth of the matter.

The Kings dominated this one early, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s paid any attention to the Thunder lately: they’ve had some seriously weak first-quarter defense of late. Eric Maynor took care of that with a half-court shot to close out the quarter, putting OKC up 27-24; they would not trail again, despite some anxious moments, and they got the win in Sacramento, 99-97.

What was most remarkable about this game was not Maynor’s 50-footer, nifty as it was, but the sheer number of technicals handed out: Maynor got one, Serge Ibaka got another, Russell Westbrook got yet another. (Didn’t seem to be a plot by the officials, since Tyreke Evans also got one.) Evans was making his presence known early on, and he put in more minutes (46) than anyone else. He got two of three free throws with 39 seconds left to pull the Kings within four, and when the Thunder couldn’t come back with a score, Evans delivered another layup. Kevin Durant earned a trip to the foul line with 5.9 left, but sent up a pair of bricks. Evans fired a trey for the win, which didn’t land, Omar Casspi tried to put it back, but that was the end of it.

Six Kings hit double figures, led by Evans with 30; DeMarcus Cousins got the only double-double of the night, with 14 points and 12 rebounds. Sacramento got most of the rebounds (49-36), most of the assists (18-12), and that late 12-2 run; had this game gone to overtime, I suspect the Kings would have won it handily.

Durant, in spite of those chunks of masonry — he missed five of 13 from the line — still managed to accumulate 35 points; Westbrook came up with 22 before disappearing late, Maynor running the point towards the end. (As of this writing, no one has explained why.) If you buy this plus/minus stuff, consider this: all the Thunder starters finished minus, all the bench players finished plus. James Harden had 11 points and five steals; Maynor finished with nine points. The Uncle Jeff factor: Green had eight points and four boards, which might qualify as “meh.”

It’s tomorrow night at Golden State, then back home to play these same Kings on Tuesday. It’s not going to be any easier, I suspect.